Despite losing to Michigan at the end of the regular season, Ohio State headed into the postseason ranked first in SP+. The Buckeyes gave no reason for that to change in the weeks that followed. Following the Buckeyes’ 34-23 win over Notre Dame in the College Football Playoff National Championship — their fourth straight playoff win by double digits — they have officially finished the season atop the pile. Notre Dame’s ranking slipped slightly, due primarily to a logjam of tightly packed teams ranked between fourth and eighth, but there’s no question who the best team of the 2024 season was.

Below are this week’s SP+ rankings. What is SP+? In a single sentence, it’s a tempo- and opponent-adjusted measure of college football efficiency. I created the system at Football Outsiders in 2008, and as my experience with both college football and its stats has grown, I have made quite a few tweaks to the system.

SP+ is indeed intended to be predictive and forward-facing. It is not a résumé ranking that gives credit for big wins or particularly brave scheduling — no good predictive system is. It is simply a measure of the most sustainable and predictable aspects of football. If you’re lucky or unimpressive in a win, your rating will probably fall. If you’re strong and unlucky in a loss, it will probably rise.

(Note: While preseason projections remain in the ratings at least a smidgen all season, I tweaked these year-end numbers to remove them a bit more. I felt that was warranted with the increased connectivity and game totals the expanded playoff gave us. But that resulted in some teams’ ratings changing for reasons other than the title game result.)

Conference rankings

Here are FBS’ nine conferences, ranked by average year-end SP+. Again, with the tweaking of preseason weights, some of these averages shifted a hair despite only one game occurring since the last ratings.

1. SEC: 14.8 average rating (32.2 offense, 18.5 defense)

2. Big Ten: 8.0 average rating (27.5 offense, 19.8 defense)

3. Big 12: 5.3 average rating (29.7 offense, 24.6 defense)

4. ACC: 5.1 average rating (30.6 offense, 25.7 defense)

5. AAC: -4.9 average rating (27.2 offense, 32.1 defense)

6. Sun Belt: -5.4 average rating (25.8 offense, 31.1 defense)

7. MWC: -7.3 average rating (24.6 offense, 30.9 defense)

8. MAC: -9.8 average rating (21.5 offense, 31.3 defense)

9. CUSA: -12.5 average rating (19.0 offense, 30.7 defense)

Due primarily to the strength of its middle class, the SEC remained the overall gold standard of the superconferences, but the Big Ten closed that gap a bit in bowl season. And while its depth wasn’t nearly as strong, it did still finish with three of the top five teams in the country. Meanwhile, the Big 12 indeed bumped ahead of the ACC after the ACC’s dreadful postseason, the AAC ended up the top Group of Five conference, and Conference USA comfortably brought up the rear.